How One Song Became The Standard to Measure Modern Drumming

First things first - download your free transcription here.

I’ll keep this brief, so you can get to watching the video.

If you’re a channel fan, you probably know and love him: Brian Blade.

But more than even one drummer, the song he made famous, Jazz Crimes, has had an outsized influence on the drum ecosystem. And, due to happy and not-so-happy coincidences, it’s kind of become the bar by which modern drumming is judged.

In this video, we dispense with all the “judgment”, and other internet noise, and focus instead on what the song can tell us about our drumming, and how to learn from it.

I take the 3 primary challenges in turn:

• The opening groove

• The drum solo

• The deceptively-difficult beginning to the organ solo

Each shows us in stark relief whether our timing, subdivision, sound-control, and idea-control are squared-away. As such, I call it a “mirror song”.

And now, friends, I’ll let you get to the video.

Hope you enjoy!

Can Practice REALLY Improve Your Drumming Speed?

First things first - download your free time-linked "improve your speed” practice routine here.

You can’t open social media without seeing a drummer showcasing their otherworldly single-stroke speed, and showing you exercises to “get there”.

Not to mention astounding shows of explosive speed from drummers like Tony Royster, Mike Mitchell, Ron Bruner, and Riccardo Merlini.

“If I just work hard enough, I’ll be able to play singles like those folks,” we think.

But what if that were wrong? What if these freakishly-fast folks were simply…born with it.

Today, I welcome drum mechanics expert and friend of the channel Brandon Green back to answer that age-old question. Several months ago he shared a provocative video comparing his - trained over 25 years - single stroke speed to his wife’s. (She’d never played drums.) And Brandon’s wife wins “going away”.

We then delve into the musculo-skeletal reasons some humans may have an advantage from birth.

But if you're on my list you probably already know the punch line: "who cares?"

It's actually several layers of who cares.

First, for the average drummer still working on functional technique, a hypothetical genetic speed limit on the very top end of their speed is like a 60mph speed limit on a freeway when our car is out of gas. Our first concern is going from zero to anything, just as most drummers' is "how can I go pretty fast cleanly and efficiently."

And we'll show you how to do that: Brandon with some strength exercises, I with some technique ones you can practice even away from the kit, and without making any noise.

But the even deeper layer of "who cares" is "how much would I use Riccardo Merlini singles in musical applications even if I could do them."

And I believe there are so many ways to be great as a drummer that, beyond the functional speed most-anyone can develop, you're unlikely to encounter the generic speed limit in the real world.

Hope you enjoy!

And if you want to grab a 14-day trial to Brandon Green’s Drum Forever Fitness Program, and support me in the process, you can do that here.

10 Tricks Pros Use for Better Drum Grooves - Do You?

First things first - download the transcriptions here.

Recently, every time I think of another lesson idea that has primarily to do with what the general public would call “fills”, I pause and think “could I also do something around groove.”

While I generally don’t like the wall-of-separation between the two - fills can have backbeats and grooves can and should include improvisation - I’m cognizant that they’re different…”directions”. They fit different parts of a song.

To that end, and as the output of reviewing quite a few student videos in the past few weeks, I thought you might enjoy a lesson on ways to spice up your drum grooves - without adding more notes.

Obviously, there are gen-z beats. The internet has solved how to fill every possible 32nd in a backbeat funk groove. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

But sometimes you want to do more with less. And to their credit, some of the very same “pros” who play those flowy/gen-z beats can also “chill” during a song, but still find ways to make grooves interesting.

From injecting “hi hat stabs” in unexpected-but-musical places, to questioning the orthodoxy of “big subdivision”, to taking a page from New Orleans, today’s 10 “tricks” are tools you can fit to the situation. Not all will be appropriate for all songs, or all parts of songs, or all tempos.

But having them in your back pocket will give you a feeling of paining with a fuller palette.

And not one of them requires more technique or faster singles (I guess those are kind of the same thing) than you currently possess.

Hope you enjoy!

Pro Drummers Do One Big Thing Differently, But You Can Do it Too

First things first - two transcriptions. First, for the “beat algorithm”. Next, for the “switching exercise”.

To the degree anything is a “magnum opus”, that’s today’s video. My “grand unified theory” on improvisation, which is to say “all drumming”.

This has been in the works over 15 years of me “retrofitting” my own playing, and 4 years of coaching students.

A culmination of all the “what’s water” moments (David Foster Wallace anecdote about two fish, one of whom remarks “the water’s lovely today” and the other who replies “what’s water?”), which is to say discovery of things I was taking for-granted that aren’t a given for those just learning to drum.

The sum of my micro-insights from “both sides of the divide” (knowing what it feels like when I feel good playing, knowing what I worked on to get there, and also seeing things through the eyes of students based on their questions, descriptions, and progress) cash out to two big things:

First, mature drummers (“pros” for the algorithm) have a kind of “bubble” around their playing, that insulates them from “mistakes” the way we typically think of them. (“Glitching”, big unintended sounds, feeling “behind your hands”, etc.)

The best analogy I could think of was the “flight envelope protection” modern fly-by-wire airplanes have. (Very short version - they won’t let you crash them.)

Second, you and I can learn to do it too.

There are many things that make great drummers great, and having a unique artistic voice is among them. But we don’t need to be artistic geniuses to teach ourselves to have that protective capsule around our playing, so we can “lean on things”, and our ideas feel insulated from “mistakes”.

**Quick disclaimer - many great drummers will say, in interviews, things like “I make mistakes all the time”, or “you should embrace mistakes”. That’s a bit misleading, imho, since any of these drummers could play a 90-minute set without once “glitching” or doing anything we’d detect as a mistake.

So, how do we do it?

By inverting the conventional understanding of improvisation. In my experience, improvisation is often seen (passive voice) as a place where you lower the guardrails, “embrace the muse”, and hope for the best.

In my opinion, that’s only useful later on. But at the beginning, I like to think “inside out”. Literally build that protective idea-capsule bit-by-bit, and rarely-if-ever play something outside of it.

This has the obvious advantage that we can practice improvising with ideas - rather than repping the same verbatim stuff over and over - while controlling the scope, so we’re always sure we’ve had a lot of reps on anything that might come up.

Finally, I reprise parts of a couple of recent lessons with examples of this type of exercises. Examples you can apply today.

Hope you enjoy!